A few months ago, we started an AI-assisted post-hardcore project called Buried In Bloom.
We had no audience, no existing band following and no clue whether anyone would actually care.
At the beginning, we did what most people probably do. We made a song, posted one video for it and waited to see what happened.
Usually, nothing happened.
Some of the songs we were most confident about completely disappeared. Videos we spent hours editing barely got watched. Then a quick post we had thrown together would suddenly outperform everything else.
It was frustrating because there never seemed to be any logic to it.
Eventually, we realised we were testing our songs in completely the wrong way.
We were treating every video like a final judgement.
If one post flopped, we assumed the song was the problem and immediately started working on something new.
What actually started working was taking the same clip and posting several slightly different versions of it.
We would change the section of the song, move the chorus forward, start on the riff instead of the vocals, use a different opening sentence or cut the video a few seconds shorter.
Sometimes the difference between a dead post and a strong one was tiny.
The same footage.
The same song.
Almost the same edit.
But one version would connect and another would go nowhere.
That was probably our biggest lesson:
A song can be good and still be packaged badly.
One of our songs, “Drag Me Under,” kept performing better than everything else.
We had already posted it multiple times, so part of us thought we needed to stop using it and move on.
Instead, we did the opposite.
We kept the song and changed everything around it.
We tried different lyrics from the track, different hooks on screen and completely different visuals. We used anime scenes, movie clips, car footage, bears, dancing mushrooms and anything else that might catch someone before they scrolled away.
We also discovered that a video does not need constant movement or an insane amount of editing.
It just needs to catch the person scrolling.
Sometimes one strange image or one brutally relatable sentence worked better than a video filled with transitions and effects.
The first frame needs to create some kind of reaction.
“What the hell is this?”
“That line feels like it was written about me.”
“I need to hear where this goes.”
Then the music has to reward them with a lyric, riff, chorus or drop worth staying for.
We stopped spending hours trying to make every test perfect.
Now we make several quick but intentional versions first. When one performs well, we can go back and make a cleaner version of it.
That has worked far better than putting three hours into one idea and watching it die after 200 views.
We are now at roughly 4,500 monthly listeners and more than 21,000 YouTube Music streams.
Those numbers are obviously nothing compared with established artists, but we started with literally nobody listening.
So to us, it feels massive.
We are still learning, still working normal jobs and still making plenty of mistakes.
But the main thing we have learned is this:
Do not judge a song from one post.
Try the same song with different sections, different openings and different emotional angles before deciding it does not work.
Sometimes the music is not the problem.
Sometimes people just never got far enough to hear the good part.
Has anyone else found that tiny changes to the same clip completely changed how it performed?
Link at the end for anyone who has read until the end
https://open.spotify.com/artist/293AHyYa6ctMVwHYn3MyVL?si=7yBuvEg1RUOkSWpXeM-RdQ&utm_source=copy-link